GANG RULE

In El Salvador, gangs rule the streets with impunity

In El Salvador, gangs rule the streets with impunity

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Jonathan’s trip to school each morning is a mad dash through back alleys.

The 14-year-old lives only three blocks from the Centro Escolar José Antonio Rodríguez Porth in the Jardines de Don Bosco neighborhood, but it’s a treacherous journey. To get to the campus, he must cross one of the invisible lines between the patchwork of gang-controlled neighborhoods in San Salvador.

Like many in this traffic-choked Central American capital of 350,000, Jonathan lives in an area controlled by one of the country’s two dominant gangs, in his case the MS-13, also known as MS or las letras, the letters.

The school sits on the border between MS-13 turf and a neighborhood controlled by its rivals, the 18th Street Gang, known simply as 18 or los numeros, the numbers.

For most of his life, Jonathan said, he walked down the main drag to school, past street vendors and tightly packed houses to the blue walls surrounding his two-building grade school. Soldiers are stationed outside the gates behind a sandbag emplacement.

One day last year, he found himself between MS-13 and 18th Street lookouts pointing pistols at each other. The standoff ended without gunfire, but he was shaken.

“When I take this way, I’m terrified there may be a gun battle, so when I leave my house I take the alleys on the MS side,” said Jonathan, who’s quick to smile and shows the beginnings of a teenage mustache. For his safety, his principal asked a reporter to identify him only by his first name.

This is daily life in San Salvador and its sprawling working-class suburbs, a metro area of nearly 2 million residents, and a prime reason for the ongoing exodus of Salvadorans to the South Texas border, where thousands flee every month looking for a better life in the U.S.

Gangs control territory all over San Salvador, from the streets near the imposing modern cathedral in the city center lined with vendors’ stalls, to the dingy apartments and houses made of cinder block and corrugated sheet metal in Mejicanos, a suburb of more than 150,000 that spreads along the city’s northern border.

El Salvador — slightly smaller than New Jersey — and its neighbors Honduras and Guatemala accounted for nearly half of all immigrants caught crossing the U.S. border last year. Civil wars, poverty and criminal violence for decades have pushed people to flee the three Central American countries, known as the Northern Triangle.

Since 2014, more than 250,000 immigrants traveling as families or as unaccompanied children, most of them from the Northern Triangle countries, have been detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents.

In response, the Border Patrol opened a processing center for children in McAllen, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement opened two large family detention centers — the first of their kind — near San Antonio. ICE since has expanded both to a combined capacity of more than 3,000.

Meanwhile, a truce that had reduced gang-related killings in El Salvador fell apart last year. In 2015, the country of 6.1 million people recorded 6,656 homicides, rivaling the carnage in the most violent years of its civil war in the 1980s. The murder rate of 108 per 100,000 people was the highest in the world last year.

By comparison, the U.S. homicide rate is less than 4 per 100,000 people.

The violence includes reports of extrajudicial killings by Salvadoran police and military. Earlier this year, the Peace Corps pulled out of the country because of the risks to its volunteers.

Gang leaders — many of them teenagers — exercise absolute power within their neighborhoods. The gangs watch closely who enters and leaves the areas they control, exact tribute from the local residents and kill those who don’t comply.

“This control isolates the community and lets the gang or criminal organization consolidate power so the population accepts them as the real authority in the area,” said Celia Medrano, program director with Cristosal, an Episcopal development organization. Such power, she said, “allows the gangs to coerce and retaliate against the people who live in that area, so the population lives in a climate of day-to-day violence that the authorities can’t control.”

“It’s been shown that that a high percent of the homicides are among gang members,” she continued. “However, there are homicides committed against people ... who refuse to participate or be complicit in the commission of crimes or join the gangs. In the case of girls and young women, they can also be killed for refusing to sexually serve the gangs, or the gang members might retaliate against their family members.”

The gangs themselves were born from the long-standing migration between the U.S. and Central America. Salvadoran hoodlums deported from the U.S. in the 1990s started the gangs that now terrorize this country.

The United States considers MS-13 a transnational criminal organization, but here its members and 18th Street Gang’s are called pandillas, a term for street gangs. Each gang comprises hundreds of subgroups called clicas. And each clica controls a small patch of turf, sometimes only a few blocks.

There’s no line through the middle of San Salvador dividing it between the MS-13 and 18th Street Gang. Instead, the city is divided into scattered territories, each controlled by a clica and with no guarantee that the next neighborhood over is in the hands of allied gang members.

The pandillas make money through extortion, euphemistically called la renta. Gang lookouts at bus stops and street corners check IDs and make young men lift their shirts to check for tattoos.

“If you’re not from the area that group controls, they kill you. They don’t ask twice,” said Amilcar Rivera, the principal at Centro Escolar Rodriguez Porth.

Crossing between gang-controlled territories is particularly dangerous for young people, “even if their relation lives on the other side,” Rivera said. “You don’t have to receive a death threat. They know there is a line and they don’t cross it.”

Driven to despair

In addition to the relentless bloodshed, a struggling economy also drives people north and is cited as the top reason for leaving — even more so than gang violence — in surveys by the Salvadoran immigration agency. More than 40 percent of the population lives in poverty. The average monthly income in 2014, the most recent data available from the Salvadoran government, was about $540.

Historically, family reunification, usually with relatives who left looking for jobs or fled the civil war that ended in 1992, also drives much of the exodus.

“If you have been in an ecosystem of crime and insecurity, you become so used to it over time, that you don’t integrate it as a problem, but rather you live with it,” said Manuel Orozco, director for migration, remittances and development at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank. “This is something we’ve been looking at all over Central America, that the environment of violence is not only systemic, almost like it’s a permanent situation, but you internalize it.”

In 2015, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 130,000 people from the Northern Triangle, 43,000 of them Salvadorans, about 40 percent of all immigrants detained that year. The vast majority crossed the border in South Texas. Nearly half of those detained were traveling in family groups or as unaccompanied children.

El Salvador trailed only Guatemala, nearly three times its size, and Mexico, more than 20 times its size, in the number of immigrants detained by the Border Patrol.

Bowing to U.S. pressure, Mexico last year stepped up enforcement on its southern border. While the number of people from the Northern Triangle countries detained by the Border Patrol fell in 2015, the number detained by immigration authorities in Mexico increased by 40 percent, indicating no slowdown of people fleeing Central America.

The U.S. government’s response has drawn mixed reviews. Congress earmarked $750 million in aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras for 2016 and the Obama administration created a program that allows children from the Northern Triangle who have family members in the U.S. to apply for refugee status without leaving their home countries.

Earlier this year, Secretary of State John Kerry announced a plan to work with the United Nations to open refugee centers in Latin America to screen asylum seekers from the three countries.

But the government’s decision to detain Central American families at the 2,400-bed detention center in Dilley and the 1,000-bed facility in Karnes County, along with raids this year targeting families and young people who entered the U.S. in 2014 but lost their asylum cases, has sparked a debate about whether Central American immigrants are refugees fleeing war-like conditions or economic opportunists.

“I think that the driving force of migration is economic, but insecurity becomes the trigger,” Orozco said of the situation in El Salvador. “If you know that you’re living on a fixed income, let’s say $200 a month, and you’re exposed to the day-to-day problems of insecurity, with violence, with extortion networks, with narco-trafficking networks, then your opportunity cost of living on $200 a month becomes very low, so people start looking elsewhere.”

‘Plague’ on the country

Victor Manuel Martínez can’t say exactly when the gangs came to Ahuachapán, a state on El Salvador’s eastern border with Guatemala.

“It increased little by little,” the 40-year-old farmer said of the gang violence. “Today, they’re not even hiding, they’re out in the open.”

The gangs’ control of the rural area where he lives came into sharp focus earlier this year, Martínez said, when gangsters tried to recruit his 17-year old son. He called the expansion of the gangs a “plague” that has taken over urban areas like San Salvador and is spreading into the countryside.

Martínez said he’d been thinking about going to the U.S. to look for better work opportunities. He made up his mind in April, after the gangsters approached his son. Martinez said he wants to work for five years, long enough to send his sons to college and move them to a safer region.

He made it through Guatemala but was picked up by immigration authorities shortly after crossing into Mexico. He ended up in a San Salvador center for recently deported emigrants.

“They want to become the power in the areas they control. They want to be the ones in charge, to be the ones who lead,” he said of the gangs. “This is what they say, that they can govern better than the authorities. But it’s a lie. In time, my son will be drug addled, in a marijuana haze, and he’ll have learned how to kill, how to take another’s life. This is not what I want for my children.”

The Comprehensive Care Center for Migrants, run by the national immigration directorate, is in yet another walled compound, this one on a quiet side street east of the city center. Smugglers and cabbies hang around outside its gates, hoping to pick up clients.

A big part of the immigration directorate’s job is handling the large number of people deported from Mexico. Before the center opened in 2011, deportees from Mexico were dropped off at El Salvador’s border with Guatemala. Now, buses roll through the migrant center’s gates almost every weekday. Flights from the U.S. deposit deportees at San Salvador’s airport.

On one Friday in April, nearly 200 Salvadorans were bused in from Mexico. Young men arrived first from Tapachula, in Mexico’s far southern corner, and were escorted into an auditorium and given snacks while an immigration official held an orientation. An aid station was on hand for those needing medical attention.

The immigration directorate buses many to transportation hubs in the northern, southern and eastern parts of the country and gives them money to make it the rest of the way home. Those who can’t return home right away are allowed to stay in the compound, built to hold immigrants from other countries detained by Salvadoran officials.

Teenagers traveling alone were led to another area while their family members waited for authorization to take them home. In the afternoon, more buses arrived from Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, these laden with families. When volunteers led a line of children ages four to eight down the hallway to occupy them while their parents went through the orientation, a matronly woman who said she was waiting for her granddaughter groaned.

“It’s a sin, what’s happening,” she said as they walked by.

Yanira, 34, went to the processing center on the same day as Martínez to wait for a 16-year-old niece who’d been caught trying to cross Mexico. She was afraid to use her full name, Yanira said, because she’d recently had to flee her home near El Salvador’s northern border with Honduras after being extorted and receiving threats. The nearby town where she relocated is infested with gangs as well, Yanira said.

The gangs have divvied up the neighborhood where she lives. She cleans houses, but can work safely only in the few blocks surrounding her home. Early this spring, Yanira said, she watched as gang members shot and injured a teenage boy who crossed the imaginary line between two clicas’ territory. It was the first time she’d seen anything like that. Now, she worries about her young son.

“Once you turn 13 or 14, they want to recruit you,” Yanira said. “I cry with my boy. I say, ‘Don’t go to the gangs,’ and he says, ‘Don’t worry.’ But I worry, because they give him no alternative. One day, there will be no alternative.

This year, nongovernmental relief organizations have seen an increase in people fleeing violence from rural areas, said Medrano, the director of programs for Cristosal. The increase came after a series of operations by government security forces in gang-controlled cities, Medrano said.

“I don’t believe the military and police forces have the capacity to cover the whole country,” she said. “What is happening is, the leadership of the gangs know they don’t have the capacity to resist, to respond to a military intervention, so they’re displaced to other areas where there’s no police and military presence, or the police and military presence isn’t as intense.”

Medrano said the story of Yanira’s sister, who fled the country to escape a gang member who wanted her to live with him, illustrates another threat facing those who live in gang-controlled neighborhoods.

Sexual violence

In April, Yanira packed her teenage niece off to the U.S. to meet the girl’s mother, Yanira’s sister, in Los Angeles.

She received threats in her hometown, Yanira said, because her niece’s father is a gang member. Her sister escaped him to live in Los Angeles, leaving Yanira to care for her daughter.

“He’s mad the mother isn’t here to be with him,” Yanira said of the gang member. “He said, ‘If you don’t stay with me, I’m going to kill you.’”

Medrano, the human rights worker, said women living in areas controlled by the gangs face a form of sexual slavery. In El Salvador, women in relationships with gang members are colloquially called novias, the Spanish word for girlfriend or fiancée. In reality, Medrano said, many are forced into what she called “sexual servitude.”

Their families also come under the gang’s control.

“The family needs to obey the gang, because their daughter, their sister, their wife is the sexual servant of the gang leader, or the gang members,” Medrano said.

Women who want to break off a relationship with a gang member need permission of the local leader, she said. When a “novia” flees to another country, gang members sometimes use social media to stalk and threaten her.

Carmen, 75, said her niece was raped a year ago in their hometown on the coast near San Salvador. Carmen’s own son was killed eight years ago by the gangs, and after the attack on her niece, members of the MS-13 gang continued to follow the teen, harassing her when she went to the store. She was afraid of having her full name published. She’s also afraid of going to the police, Carmen said.

It’s dangerous, she said, for young people in her neighborhood.

“For the women, maybe it’s much worse,” Carmen said. “Because being a woman, if they want, they can force them into sex.”

Her niece was supposed to be joining a friend who lives in Mexico when she was detained by immigration authorities there and deported to El Salvador in April, her aunt said.

Sexual violence against women by the gangs isn’t limited to the taking of “novias,” Medrano said. Sometimes the gangs target a young woman for rape and move on.

“A girl of 14 years will be be approached by a classmate and he’ll say, ‘So-and-so sent me to tell you that on this day you show up at this house,’ here they’re called destroyer houses,” Medrano said, using the English word. “They’re houses that are controlled by the gangs. ‘You need to go to this house when you get out of school.’ And she knows that there will be a group of gangsters there who will rape her. And she has to go.”

Forced displacement

Not all those who who flee their homes leave immediately for the United States. Internal displacement is also a problem in El Salvador. While tens of thousands try to go to the U.S. every year, a 2014 study by the Colombian human rights group Consejo Noruego para los Refugiados estimated that there were about 289,000 people living in El Salvador who’d been driven out of their homes.

One refugee from the coastal region, a 52-year-old man who didn’t want to give his name, said he fled to San Salvador after being shot seven times earlier this year. The man opened his mouth to show where one bullet had shattered teeth on the left side of his face. He lifted his shirt to show the healed bullet wounds on his chest and one of his shoulders.

The gangsters came for him after accusing him of providing information to the police that led to the arrest of five gang members, the man said. He went to the gang leaders, bringing paperwork showing he was out of town on the day of the arrests and thought he had resolved the situation. Then one day earlier this year he answered a knock on his door.

“I was asleep,” the man said. “Somebody knocked on the door. They said it was the police. I didn’t recognize the voice because I was sleeping and my mistake was to open the door. He said … ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to do this.’ He tried to come in and I fought him. Luckily he had the gun very close to my body. If he had the gun farther away, he would have shot me in the head.”

He survived and sought refuge from an aid group in the capital. At first he thought about staying here, but now the man said he’s afraid the gangsters who shot him will find him, or the criminals in his new neighborhood will question why he relocated.

He’s considering seeking asylum in Canada, but he’s afraid to go to the police to get documentation of his attack.

“Sometimes it is not that prudent to go to the police and tell the police what happened, because the police are connected to the gangs,” he said.

There are limited options for the internally displaced, said Blanca Irma Rodríguez, coordinator for Pastoral Migrante, a migrant support group run by the Salvadoran Lutheran Church.

Rodríguez said her organization has come across a few cases of people displaced by police persecution, but the vast majority are fleeing the gangs. Relocating to territory controlled by another clica isn’t a guarantee of safety, she said. Paranoid young gang members are distrustful of new arrivals, and people who end up in territory controlled by another clica within the same gang they’re fleeing can be tracked down and killed.

“With those who are displaced, for example to another city or another community, we try to find them, we try to help them, we try to create space for them, and we want to give them a little seed money so they can open a small business or create something there in this new place where they live,” Rodríguez said.

“Of course, it’s important that I tell you, the situation to which they’ve arrived is so extreme that many will refuse to accept the assistance we want to give, because they’re afraid of opening a business,” he continued. “They say, ‘Look, I’m forever grateful, but if I open a business, they’ll immediately come and extort me, and even could kill me, because they’re going to know I have money.’”

If El Salvador doesn’t improve its educational system, provide more economic opportunities and better protect its citizens from the gangs, many of the internally displaced will take the path through Mexico to the U.S., Rodríguez said.

“Internal displacement is the first phase of what we call migration,” she said. “And the cause of the problem is violence.”

jbuch@express-news.net

Twitter: @jlbuch

Next: Rampant violence, poverty forcing exodus from El Salvador

After fleeing violence, Salvadorans face a difficult hurdle in getting U.S. asylum

When immigration officials approached Maria Ayala in the parking lot of a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Italian restaurant on May 19, it wasn’t a total surprise.

Ayala, a native of El Salvador who crossed the Rio Grande last year and asked for asylum, said she stopped traveling more than 200 miles to the immigration court in Bloomington, Minnesota, after a judge told her she needed a lawyer. Earning $160 a week cleaning office buildings and babysitting for a friend didn’t leave Ayala, 39, and her 14-year-old daughter with enough money to hire someone to represent them.

Ayala was among the more than 40,000 Salvadorans who fled their country last year and were caught trying to enter the U.S. She surrendered to Border Patrol agents near McAllen and, like most families caught crossing the Rio Grande, was released after a few days with a notice to appear in immigration court.

A friend in Sioux Falls who Ayala had met on a pilgrimage to Guatemala bought her a bus ticket. She and her daughter settled on the prairie.

Ayala said she left El Salvador because members of MS-13, one of the two gangs that control large swaths of the country, wanted her to pay $30 a week in extortion, called la renta. She couldn’t afford it, so the gang members threatened to kidnap and rape her daughter.

“They said, ‘We know where you live, your daughter’s name, where she goes to school. One day your daughter won’t return, and you’ll know you paid with her disappearance,’” Ayala said during a phone interview in late May from the family detention center in Dilley, where she was asking a judge to reopen her case.

In June, she was moved to a smaller facility in Pennsylvania. Earlier this month, immigration officials told her she would be deported, but returned her to detention after her lawyers obtained an emergency stay of her deportation, according to the CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project, which represents families in the detention centers.

A combination of outdated asylum laws and a confusing bureaucracy make it difficult for Central American families seeking asylum to stay in the U.S., immigration lawyers say.

“There has just sort of been this institutional hostility toward asylum and there is a bias against claims from countries, as far as I can tell, where you speak Spanish,” said Laura Lichter, general counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“We all have this kind of romantic idea of what political asylum is, because you see it on TV and it works really great,” she continued. “Hey, it’s a spy, it’s an activist, it’s all pretty simple, and it seems to work. But the reality is, it doesn’t.”

Asylum-seekers must show that they have a credible fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or because they are part of a social group, and that the government in their home countries can’t or won’t protect them.

Even with the vague category of “social group” available, Central Americans have struggled to convince immigration judges that threats from powerful gangs represent the same type of persecution meted out by a dictator. Criminal organizations operating with total impunity is a fairly new phenomenon.

At the same time, Lichter said, families from Central America are put on a special expedited docket, overwhelming organizations that provide free or reduced-cost legal representation.

The Obama administration has given some signs that its views on the region are changing. Last year, it launched the Central American Minors Program, which allows children with family in the U.S. to apply for refugee status without leaving their home countries.

The program has been criticized because it hasn’t been widely advertised and few people have been accepted. The government has received 7,000 applications and approved 1,100.

Another program, announced this year in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, will create refugee camps in the region where those fleeing violence can apply for entrance to the U.S. It hasn’t gotten off the ground.

Meanwhile, since October, the U.S. has deported more than 11,000 immigrants to El Salvador, and the same number to Honduras, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said during a May trip to the region.

“My message in both countries: our borders are not open to illegal or ‘irregular’ migration,” Johnson said in a statement after his trip. “If you have been apprehended at our border, have a final order of removal, and have no pending claim for asylum or other humanitarian relief under our laws, we must send you home.”

Critics of Obama and Johnson accused them of taking a schizophrenic approach that focuses on deportations while paying lip service to refugee resettlement.

“The administration argues that the Northern Triangle is dangerous enough to set up a refugee processing program, but not so dangerous that they will stop deporting individuals back to their deaths,” said Jose Magaña-Salgado, immigration policy attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

His organization is calling on the Department of Homeland Security to offer Temporary Protected Status, which grants work permits to immigrants whose home countries are too dangerous to return to even if they’re in the U.S. illegally, for people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Magaña-Salgado and others who support making it easier for Central American children and families to immigrate argue that the U.S. has a moral imperative to help those fleeing the violence in the Northern Triangle.

That doesn’t sit well with some restrictionists, who argue that U.S. national interests, not moral obligations, should inform the country’s immigration policies.

“Is there any limiting principle to that idea? That’s my question,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for restricting immigration to the U.S. “The answer is no. There are 40 million people in Central America. Should we let them in? And why Central America? Because it’s closer? ... What is the yardstick, what is the standard? There is no standard.”

jbuch@express-news.net

Twitter: @jlbuch

Next: A surge of foreign aid

U.S. throws a lifeline of foreign aid to combat violence in El Salvador

SAN VICENTE, El Salvador – Elementary school children crowd the courtyard of the El Centro de Alcanza por mi Barrio Colonia Santa Elena on weekday afternoons to do their homework.

Many of El Salvador’s schools don’t offer afternoon classes, so this workshop isn’t just a way to help them improve academically, it’s a way to keep them off the streets.

Like much of the country, children of this city, tucked in the mountains of central El Salvador, are at risk, said Sindy Burgos, coordinator of the youth outreach center.

While their parents are at work, the center serves as a refuge from the violence and gang recruitment on the streets. It also opens its doors on weekends.

“The kids are afraid to go out, so they don’t go out,” Burgos said. “And I have to work Saturday and Sunday, because they want to be here, therefore I need to be here.”

San Vicente’s city center is picturesque, home to an 18th century church and a plaza that hosts a monthly gastronomic festival. The inviting setting contrasts with neighborhoods like Barrio Santa Elena that are controlled by the country’s two warring street gangs, making it dangerous to walk the streets at night. The daughters of some gang members come to the center, Burgos said. She calls them “the rescued.”

The year-old youth center is part of a $24.8 million effort by the U.S. government that was launched in 2013 to improve security in 33 Salvadoran cities. The center received $25,000 in assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development to pay for computers, furniture and other equipment. USAID also trained the staff.

U.S.-funded outreach programs are expected to receive a dramatic boost this year. For the 2016 budget, lawmakers allocated an unprecedented $750 million in aid to the three Central American countries that send the most immigrants to the U.S. According to the Washington Office on Latin America, that’s more than double the assistance provided two years ago, when the migration of women and families from Central America suddenly surged.

The goal of this new funding: Reduce the stream of migrants to the U.S. by improving conditions in their home countries.

Immigration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras has escalated at the same time it has slowed from Mexico. The three so-called Northern Triangle countries now account for about 40 percent of the those detained by Border Patrol.

Since 2014, when immigration officials in the Rio Grande Valley were overwhelmed by the new wave of young people and families, attention has focused on border security and the triggers causing so many Central Americans to flee their countries.

Addressing the root causes of the migration is a shift in from national policies that have historically focused on the border, said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo.

“When I look at foreign affairs in Mexico and Central America, I think people have become a lot more receptive to understanding what’s going on,” said Cuellar, whose district includes parts of Bexar County and the Rio Grande Valley. “And I think a lot of it is what was going on with the unaccompanied kids and the large numbers, and I think that had an impact on the members.”

Economic problems and violence are largely to blame for driving more than 400,000 Central American immigrants to the U.S. in the last two years. In 2014, Honduras was considered the most violent country in the world with 66 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Last year, as a truce between the two most powerful gangs in this country fell apart, El Salvador surpassed its larger neighbor, recording more than 6,600 homicides, a rate of 108 per 100,000.

By improving economic and security conditions in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the U.S. can discourage residents of those countries from immigrating, officials said.

To describe the strategy, Cuellar uses a football analogy, saying that spending exclusively on border security is tantamount to “spending resources on our one-yard line.”

The majority of the new aid will be spent on development and economic support for the three countries, a departure from a highly criticized past U.S. focus on funding police and military. There are still observers who say the spending is insufficient and carries requirements that are detrimental to the Northern Triangle.

Creating local jobs

Sugar cane production dominates the economy in a stretch of the Jiboa Valley between the capital of San Salvador and San Vicente. Historically, local farmers sold their cane to be processed elsewhere. Sometimes the cane was milled in the valley, but the profits of the refined product, which can be sold to local bakers or in bulk abroad, didn’t go to local business owners.

The smallest country in Central America, El Salvador also is the most densely populated. Even in rural areas, the tropical forests covering mountainsides are dotted with small farms, makeshift shacks and underfed livestock.

The Asociación Cooperativa de Paneleros de El Salvador, a cooperative of sugar producers, is trying to create a business model that would stop the flight of capital and keep profits in the valley. Ten years ago, local entrepreneurs in the town of Verapaz came together to build a cane-processing plant that internationally markets the end product of sugar cane cultivation: bags of various types of sugar that are ready for use in the kitchen.

The cooperative has more than 20 members and 50 employees, said Ana Vilma González, the group’s treasurer. A teacher by trade, González said she joined the cooperative in 2010, which her father, a sugar-miller, helped start with assistance from the Inter-American Development Bank.

“We say, it’s not the same community,” she said of the cooperative’s impact on the region. “We’ve been able to employ people from the area.”

The cooperative has worked with churches, schools and local government to try to curb crime in the area, González said.

She said USAID has helped the cooperative build its business, which produces 250,000 pounds of sugar a year. Last year, the agency helped match the cooperative with a U.S. buyer at a fair in California, she said.

USAID also sent in an expert who analyzed the cooperative’s production process. The expert found that by streamlining production – the milling of the sugar cane is an artisanal process that happens off-site – the cooperative could triple its annual output.

Now, they’re trying to get another development bank loan to implement the recommendations, Gonzalez said.

Pressure relief

In 2011, USAID launched a nearly $13 million small business development program that will end this year. The money has been spent on 14 development centers and technical assistance to the Salvadoran government.

The U.S. is trying to replicate in the Northern Triangle the small business development strategy that works back home, said Robert McKinley, the senior associate vice president for economic development at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The university is one of USAID’s subcontractors in the region.

UTSA’s small business development center helps entrepreneurs expand and become economic generators in 20 Latin American countries. The center offers training and assessments of businesses, helps entrepreneurs find new marketing opportunities, improve their accounting systems or seek new financing, McKinley said.

“There’s markups every step of the way, so if you have more vertically integrated (businesses), which means capturing more steps of the process within your own company, you can make more money,” he said. “But that requires more sophisticated, not just production process, but business organization. You have to have more departments, more programs, you need to hire more people, you need to be more market savvy.”

McKinley said U.S. efforts to protect the border and improve El Salvador’s security apparatus needs to be paired with economic development.

“We call it a pressure-release valve,” he said. “If you don’t have enough economic opportunities or jobs, if you have 50,000 youths getting out of high school, and only have 10,000 jobs, what are the other 40,000 going to do? Either join gangs or migrate. If you give them other options, they have a better chance of staying.”

Using a ‘heavy hand’

The U.S. assistance is supposed to be spent in conjunction with Plan Salvador Seguro, a well-received initiative by the Salvadoran government to reduce violence by focusing on economic development, community outreach programs like the youth center in San Vicente, and education and public security.

The San Vicente city government is participating in Salvador Seguro. At the Colonia Santa Elena youth outreach center, the city pays the rent and the coordinator’s salary.

Observers are concerned that the resolve to take a comprehensive approach to solving the problems of violence and economic insecurity are dissolving in the face of last year’s sudden increase in homicides.

The deaths, and an ensuing public outcry, pushed El Salvador to take a more confrontational approach. Known as mano dura, or heavy hand, policies, they were popular in the early 2000s and are characterized by military-like incursions by security forces into gang territories and mass arrests.

Experts warned that mass arrests only push more young people into overcrowded jails and prisons, which are controlled by the gangs. The resurgence of mano dura has been met with reports of abuses, including extrajudicial killings, by Salvadoran police and armed forces.

“It’s taking the fight to the street, and there are some people who would be supportive of that, but there are a lot of people who are innocent people who are forced to live in those neighborhoods because of their socioeconomic status in society, and they’re caught in the crossfire,” said Shaina Aber, the former director of policy for the U.S. Jesuit Conference.

“It’s really driven people into the arms of the gangs,” Aber continued. “If you think police are acting as a gang, it’s really hard to tell the difference. And I think it really undoes some of the work the government has been trying to do on community policing.”

As part of the Alliance for Prosperity in the Northern Triangle, a regional plan announced last year in conjunction with President Obama’s massive aid request, the three countries made a number of commitments. Some are praised, such as requirements to strengthen the judicial systems and combat money laundering and corruption.

Requirements to reform the tax code and energy sectors to encourage foreign investment have not been well received.

“In the end, when you look at what benefits have actually been produced for most people in a country like El Salvador or Honduras or Guatemala, the evidence does not suggest that the wealth that is generated is coming back to broad segments of the population,” said Oscar Chacón, an El Salvador native who now heads the Chicago-based Alianza Americas, which works to improve quality of life across the Americas.

“That is not how we’re going to get to the goal of changing the economic opportunities in these countries … making these countries places people are happy to be and not thinking of leaving.”

Chacón questions America’s sudden interest in the Northern Triangle. The region suffers from economic instability, poor rule of law and criminal violence. But Chacón said U.S. officials he speaks to seem to hope that a quick injection of aid will help slow the migration from the region, something he called “short-term political planning.”

What’s required, he said, is a long-term strategy that builds the middle class in Central America.

Chacon said the U.S. is on the right track in wanting “to make Central American countries places where people are happy enough to want to stay.” However, he said, over the last 20 years the U.S. has not enacted measures “that have truly resulted in changing the landscape of economic and social opportunity in Central American countries.”

The dream: A better life

At the outreach center in San Vicente, the concerns are much more basic. Burgos is trying to help dozens of children who only see a future as either a police officer or gang member. They live with day-to-day violence and substance abuse.

“Imagine how it is here, in the night sometimes there’s banging on a door, a mother screaming,” she said. “The next day, you wait for a news story. They came to his house and they took him. No one knows why.”

It’s hard to explain to children that they shouldn’t do drugs when their parents are users or that they shouldn’t join a gang when family members sport tattoos declaring membership with one criminal group or another.

In an effort to deal with this, the students work on a project called “The Challenge of Dreaming my Life,” a curriculum developed by USAID. The idea is to envision a life beyond the few blocks of their neighborhood — a neighborhood where it can be more dangerous to leave than to remain.

The project educates children about the opportunities such as scholarships and college education. Some of curriculum is more abstract. Burgos said the children have to map out a future or a “dream” for themselves, their families and their friends.

“When the children arrive, when the teenagers arrive, they come here at zero,” said Francisco Escobar, a 66-year-old community leader who volunteers at the center. “Little by little, they start to think about the things we’re teaching them … and we start to see results.”

jbuch@express-news.net

Twitter: @jlbuch

Next: Young volunteers risk their own lives to save others

Young volunteers risk their own lives to save others

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — On Friday nights, the Comandos de Salvamento emergency services station in the center of this city looks like a church lock-in.

Teenagers and 20-somethings sprawl over chairs that were ripped out of volunteer EMTs’ sports utility vehicles when they were converted to ambulances. Some young people flirt, play on their cell phones and watch U.S. movies and TV shows dubbed in Spanish on a screen hanging in the breezeway of the abandoned print shop that’s been repurposed as a clinic, staging area and shelter.

Others are called to help with construction projects to improve the compound or help assemble donated wheelchairs. Every night there’s an assembly, prayer and drills.

When a call comes in, the phones are put down and the yellow-shirted volunteers, some too young to drive, swarm onto the vehicles, ready to rush out to car wrecks and shootings.

There is no shortage of calls that are forwarded to the Comandos, a 56-year-old institution. This country of 6 million people is considered one of the most dangerous in the world, beset by more than 6,600 killings last year. Despite a brief ceasefire this spring between two warring gangs, the slayings have continued, approaching nearly 500 by the end of February.

In one night early this year, 40 people were killed. That would be equivalent to 40 homicides in one night in the entire Houston metro area. By comparison, Houston, with a population of 3 million, recorded fewer than 300 homicides last year.

The situation reminds Roberto Cortez, the Comandos’ philosophical executive director, of the country’s civil war, which started in the 1980s and concluded in 1992. Cortez, 54, joined the group when he was 13 and served through the war, when the Comandos were a sort of nonpartisan combat medic service.

“The soldier during the civil war, he would say, ‘I’m going to kill you because you’re a guerrilla,’ without investigating. That’s it,” Cortez said. “The pandilleros (gangsters) say, ‘I’m going to kill you because you’re part of the enemy,’ and that’s it. Both the army and the guerrillas used to influence through terror in the communities. Now the gangs, it’s the same. They gain influence in the territory through terror.”

In the opening years of the civil war, 18 of the EMT volunteers were killed, Cortez said. As the Comandos showed themselves willing to help the wounded on both sides of the conflict, commanders with the government forces and the rebels began to trust them, he said.

With violent gangs now controlling a patchwork of territories across San Salvador, the Comandos’ 3,500 volunteers once again find themselves taking risks as they cross battle lines.

Three years ago, Comandos began having problems as they entered gang-controlled neighborhoods. Gang lookouts asked for identification, made them undress and show tattoos, and on some occasions held the emergency responders at gunpoint. In one incident, the Comandos were saved when a gang member recognized a volunteer with whom he’d gone to school.

Through intermediaries, the Comandos asked the gang leaders for help. They received a letter from them giving the emergency responders a list of requirements for entering gang territory. They had to wear their yellow uniforms, ask for permission from the local gang members to go into neighborhoods, and they had to drive with headlights off and emergency lights on after dark.

EMT becomes victim

The Comandos, who survive off a mix of government funds and donations, aren’t alone. El Salvador’s public health ministry has its own national emergency service, but it lacks the capability to cover the entire country, leaving a need for homegrown groups like the Comandos and international groups like the Red Cross.

Cortez said that in some neighborhoods, the gangs will let only one group enter and bar others.

“Remember that we lived with war for 12 years,” Cortez said. “And then we were in the postwar period, and everything was open. We could come and go without asking permission. With this happening, we’ve come to understand the problem we’re in.”

Cortez recalls having to tell a soldier during the civil war that he couldn’t transport a guerrilla out of a Comandos ambulance. “When they’re in the ambulance, they’re civilians,” he told the soldier.

Sometimes that approach still works. The Comandos are afforded some degree of respect in the Parque Centenario area north of central San Salvador, home of their central base. Recently, when a wounded gang member came running to the Comandos’ compound, the young men chasing him broke off their pursuit.

The gangs don’t always buy into Cortez’s argument that everyone in the ambulance is a civilian. For safety’s sake, injured MS-13 members need to be taken to hospitals in territory that gang controls, and the same for 18th Street Gang members.

Carlos De Leon, 50, recalled a recent trip to the Jardines de Don Bosco area, a neighborhood controlled by two warring gang factions, answering a call for an ambulance. De Leon said he and the other volunteers couldn’t find a gang member from whom to ask permission to enter the neighborhood, so they continued to the address of the call. As he waited in the ambulance, De Leon said, he saw one of the volunteers walking back to the vehicle — followed by a young man holding a pistol to the volunteer’s head.

“He said, ‘You have to ask permission to be here.’ So we had to leave the person who was in the house. It was too dangerous, so we had to flee the place,” De Leon said.

“I had much confidence before, during the conflict,” De Leon said of the civil war. “If they saw our yellow shirts, whether it was the army or the guerrillas, they let us pass. Today, some gangs let us in and others, no.”

That confidence was shaken further this spring. On April 10, gunmen entered the Comandos staging area in Quezaltepeque, north of San Salvador, and killed 14-year-old volunteer Erick Beltrán.

During the civil war, volunteers were killed at their homes, traveling on the highways, at school or at their place of work, but they were never attacked while in uniform, Cortez said. The Comandos are investigating who killed Beltrán, but they have reason to believe he was targeted for refusing to join a gang, he said.

The attack “caused a mental imbalance,” Cortez said.

“What surprised us is we thought we would have desertions in all of our delegations, and that the parents (of volunteers) would convince their children to not come to the institution,” he said. “The parents gave us a vote of confidence, as did the volunteers, and in recent days many more young people have joined the organization.”

Refuge from violence

For the young volunteers, the Comandos are a refuge. More than 90 percent of the volunteers are in their teens and 20s, Cortez said.

He knows from his own experience that young people working with the Comandos can be put in difficult, sometimes traumatizing, situations, but he credits the group for seeing him safely through the civil war. He hopes that for today’s young volunteers, their work with the Comandos will get them through the current gang conflict. He quotes an often-repeated phrase here: “In El Salvador, to be young is a crime.”

Irvin Altamirano, 16, joined the Comandos when he was 8 years old. He spends almost every day of the week at the base in central San Salvador, drinking coffee late into the night to stay alert. He said he’s partly there because the Comandos need the help. The other reason: it keeps him away from dangers on San Salvador’s streets.

“Here with the Comandos, I feel more safe,” he said. “It’s like, we say, it’s a second family.”

Hector Peraza found more than just a second family, he found a second home. Peraza, 28, sometimes spends the night at the volunteer center, afraid to return to the suburb of Ilopango, on the banks of a lake of the same name east of San Salvador.

It’s not just the threats and the proposals to join the gang that have dogged him since he was much younger, Peraza said. Because it’s so dangerous to set foot on the street, he’s a prisoner in his home until his his shift begins with the Comandos. It’s his only option for recreation and socializing.

“I don’t like to go home. It’s better I stay here, because they, when you go to the bus, people are waiting. They ask for your ID to see if you live there in the neighborhood,” Peraza said. “My mom asks why I don’t want to live there, and I tell her, ‘I’m here with the Comandos because I feel better. Nothing’s going to happen to me, and I’m helping people.’ ”

More than 20 volunteers are living at the former print house and another residence next door. Cortez said he’s considering taking in more people, and their family members as well.

Carlos Vasquez, 26, was one of the first to take up permanent residence at the staging area. He moved there four years ago from his beach side hometown. Like many volunteers, Vasquez is a legacy member. An uncle encouraged him to train as a lifeguard with the Comandos at a young age, and he became a volunteer when he was 12 years old.

He relocated to San Salvador, Vasquez said, to avoid the gangs in his hometown. He’d taken work as a waiter in a tourist area that was controlled by rivals of the gang that ruled his neighborhood. Sometimes he spent the night at the restaurant to avoid the young thugs waiting outside.

So he moved to San Salvador with five other lifeguards, most of whom have since left for the U.S. He gets money from his family to survive, but he said it’s dangerous taking the bus around town and he’s had a hard time finding work — many companies are afraid of hiring young men from poor neighborhoods.

He tries to escape through his work with the Comandos, but even then he’s reminded of it when they get calls for shootings.

“The violence is still there,” he said. “No matter where we go, there’s someone who wants to do harm. Whether we go with the ambulance, or don’t go with the ambulance, we’re still part of the violence.”

Vasquez tried several years ago to migrate to the United States and made it as far as the Texas border, only to be detained by Mexican officials and sent back to El Salvador. He has a friend in Long Beach, California, and is considering trying again.

Cortez, the Comandos’ executive director, said he understands why so many young people want to flee to the U.S.

“It’s difficult for them to be kids,” he said of the teenagers gathered one Friday night this spring at the old printing shop. The fact that so many would rather be there than in the gangs gives him hope, though.

“In our country there is still a light of hope for the youth and for their parents, because there are more of us good people who live here than there are bad,” Cortez said.